Access Road

by Gee, Maurice

  ‘You’re cruel. How can a man like Dickie stay with you?’ she wept.

  I was, in fact, more than one woman at that time. Mistaking bitterness for a genre, I wrote little paragraphs describing how ill used I was. But several of them got away from me and turned into stories. I keep them with my poems in a folder in the bottom of my undies drawer, where Dickie never goes. One or two are not bad. Here’s the best of them. I’ll paste it in, so turn the page.

  • • •

  Mother’s Holiday

  ‘You had better ring for a taxi,’ Anna Worth said briefly. She had ceased her slow pacing of the kitchen and was leaning her uncomfortable weight against the deal table.

  John Worth reached for his hat and came round the room to face his wife. ‘I’m sorry for this, Anna,’ he said, his voice roughly sympathetic. With instinctive tact he withheld his customary kiss and let himself quietly out into the night.

  Like a figure in a tableau the woman at the table remained motionless. Inwardly she was mustering strength for the age-old ordeal; only then did she give voice to her pain and fear. ‘Will I never get used to this?’ she exclaimed impatiently. ‘Never –’ the word seemed to mock her; ‘Never!’ Anna Worth’s babies had all, at their appointed times, arrived in the still hours of the night. ‘Moon moths fluttering in by night light,’ she had once, in a serene moment, described them. Her fifth child promised to be no exception to this nocturnal rule.

  The town clock was striking twelve, when the taxi, with its somewhat tense and shaken occupants, swept up to the curb at the hospital entrance. Spry with relief, the driver took Anna’s suitcase and hastened to deposit it in the open doorway. Back in his seat, he lit a cigarette with relish, watched his fare disappear, mused for a moment on the strangeness of life, then deftly spun his car away and out on its return journey. In sudden appreciation of his carefree bachelorhood he began to sing to the accompaniment of his thrumming tyres.

  In the white-lit hospital corridor, Anna was looking at John. The great stone building about and above them seemed empty of all sound, hushed in a midnight silence. The night nurse, on rubber-shod feet, had gone to wake the matron.

  Anna, experiencing a curious moment of awareness, saw her husband as a complete stranger, about whose positive self she knew nothing. His face, in the harsh light, appeared to have taken on new and deeper lines. Presently he would go, and she would be left to bring his child into the world. He would go, his strong, free body untouched by her travail; soon he would be comfortably bedded in his sister’s suburban home, and she, Anna—

  ‘Will you please come this way?’ the night nurse called down the corridor length.

  ‘Good-night, Anna – good-night, girl.’ John Worth patted his wife’s shoulder. He stood irresolute for one awkward moment and then, with much unsaid, he left her abruptly. Watching him go, Anna felt a sudden tug of pity for him; his inability to aid her even by word of mouth. ‘Men are such babies,’ she thought appropriately.

  There was a clock in the labour room; a small, implacable-faced clock that stood on a locker top. Anna, prostrate now, and nearing her ‘big moment’, could follow the slow, slow progress of its hands. As each wave of pain caught and carried her, she sought its round face desperately. ‘Soon,’ she kept praying silently. ‘Soon now, soon!’

  The matron, a sister and a nurse were whiling away the in between minutes discussing golf. Grimly Anna lay listening to their trivial enthusiasms. ‘They have waited at this table often enough,’ she thought, ‘but they have never yet waited on it! No wonder they can talk golf!’ She moaned uneasily and at once the matron was beside her.

  ‘Now –’ the efficient voice commanded. Anna felt a firm hand against her back, she gathered her strength valiantly, but as the old, old agony, so hardly borne, gripped her body she turned over convulsively.

  ‘Back now!’ the matron ordered sharply and slapped Anna’s bare buttock, much as the farmer slaps the rump of a refractory cow! Hot humiliation flooded Anna’s distressed mind. ‘I’ll not forget that slap,’ she vowed breathlessly.

  At two o’clock she asked for chloroform. The matron fitted the thrice-blessed gauze mask to her patient’s perspiring nose and hurriedly sought the container which held that most goodly of gifts to mankind – chloroform. During the final long breath of relief it brought to Anna her baby was born – so suddenly and swiftly as to surprise the four women in the theatre, Anna most of all. Soft as down she felt it lying against her upper thigh, her baby, already in its first scarce-breathing moment, a treasure beyond price.

  ‘What is it?’ Anna asked weakly.

  ‘A girl,’ said the matron, with calm satisfaction, and proceeded to call for the tiny being’s first cry.

  ‘You can talk golf now,’ Anna said thoughtlessly – and closed her heavy sleep-starved eyes. She was tired! tired! tired! but gladly so. Somewhere in this big grey hospital there was a warm bed waiting for her – and in the nursery there would be a cot for her baby, a cot with ‘Worth’ printed on its white tag; one cot among many, and to Anna, by far the most important cot.

  ‘There’s a breathless hush in the ward tonight!’ Anna misquoted. She was sitting up in her bed, titivating, as were two of her ward mates. It was visiting hour again; at least three dutiful husbands were scheduled to tiptoe (instinctive habit) into the ward. Anna glanced covertly to the corner bed on her right hand. On it lay an outsize in women, huddled beneath her covers. For two days this fat girl had lain face to the wall, a bundle of dejection. Anna knew she was a childless mother, her baby having been stillborn; she suspected too that the unhappy girl was also husbandless, although on her plump left hand she wore a bright gold wedding ring.

  ‘Poor girl,’ thought Anna, ‘she has no baby, and something tells me, no husband either. And to be on a starvation diet, too – no wonder she’s always weeping under her blankets.’

  The two more fortunate of Anna’s companions were eagerly discussing a plan to outwit the sister on duty should their husbands bring forbidden dainties into the ward.

  Suddenly the squeak of a man’s boots sent a thrill of anticipation through the ward. Three pairs of eyes turned hopefully towards the door. Through it a thick-set man was peering short-sightedly, discomfort and doubt reddening his heavy face. In one hot hand he was gripping a bunch of wilted, mixed flowers.

  ‘Is Jesse McDoo in here?’ he asked, catching Anna’s friendly eye.

  There was a sudden movement in the bed on Anna’s right.

  ‘Dad!’ the fat girl was crying. ‘Dad! Oh, Dad!’

  Presently, from behind the screen that the man adjusted round his daughter’s bed, Anna heard his first whisper: ‘Your Mum don’t know I’m here.’

  Anna lay back on her pillows and pulled the blankets up around her ears. She felt she would rather guess the fat girl’s story than hear it by eavesdropping. ‘Bless the man for a kind father,’ she breathed thankfully. And then John Worth walked in, and everyone’s story but her own became unimportant.

  The long ward was a-buzz with whispered conversations. Secretive screens were round the four beds. The three babies had been brought in on the arm of the obviously bored nurse and distributed one to each bed. Anna, with her precious bundle propped up on her knees, looked at her husband.

  ‘She’s a beautiful baby,’ she said.

  ‘All your babies have been beautiful, Anna,’ John Worth complimented quietly.

  ‘All our babies,’ Anna corrected, and smiled into his sincere eyes.

  ‘Lights out in ten minutes,’ the bored nurse called from the doorway. ‘This baby racket is bunk!’ she grumbled impatiently to herself. Outside the hospital her fiancé was waiting for her.

  • • •

  I like that. I managed to step outside myself into other lives, trailing no more than bits of anger and disappointment. My failure to write more stories about that Anna who is not me, and find other fat girls, is part of the stain I step around.

  Oddly enough, Dickie and I still enjoyed each ot
her. I don’t mean in bed, although that too made a stop-and-start new beginning not long after the shrill woman departed, bearing gifts (and wearing them), from Dickie’s life. I mean I enjoyed knowing him and not being barred from the rooms of self-delight he inhabited; and enjoyed all his stumbles and shouts of rage; his delusions of importance; his open pleasures and feeble lies, and the way he swelled himself with victories – he needed one each day, even if it was no more than winning a twenty-dollar bet with one of his mates. All these things added up to Dickie. In many ways I preferred him to John Worth. With John Worth I had one foot trapped in my former self – one foot in a bog. Dragging free took time, although the fat girl, hidden under blankets, and her father creaking along the ward meant I was making progress. But when I was free and held myself firmly by the hand, I grew lazy. Rediscovering Dickie seemed enough – yet he’s such a simple organism, how could that be? Is he my victory or defeat?

  He came straggling back, bringing more of himself each time, and I made matching efforts, with clothes and hair, so that he need not be ashamed of me. We set up house in Kohimarama, back from the beach, and set up our marriage again, and endured bumpy times and enjoyed smooth ones, and fitted beside each other into a life that satisfied us like a meal continually interrupted. I mean our stomachs rumbled and our taste buds were not right, but we finished with coffee and a liqueur, then strolled in the garden, sniffing the night flowers and admiring the moon.

  I’m diminished, I know it, but I gave my agreement to becoming the person I am. So no complaints. Dickie is my companion. I have no complaints about him either.

  His business prospered. He joined the fish man and the cricket-bat man – a millionaire, which doesn’t mean today what it meant back then, so, a millionaire several times over. (My father would have called him rich and my mother wealthy.) Then he surprised me. I had thought he was enjoying himself and would go on, but I had forgotten he was playing a game, playing to win, and games come to an end. Somewhere in the jumble of aggressions and enjoyments that fill his mind, Dickie heard the referee blow full time. He raised his arms in triumph and plodded from the field.

  In his long retirement we have become less ‘wealthy’. Dickie could never work up interest in investing his money. He put it here and put it there, grumbling that it wasn’t work and, I could see, thinking that it wasn’t any sort of contest either. We lost quite heavily in the 1987 crash; but never mind, Dickie says, we’ve still got plenty. ‘Let those silly bastards play their games,’ he says, which makes me giggle. So we go on.

  From Kohimarama we shifted to a beachfront house in Takapuna, and then to a smaller one back from the beach, where we found roses in bloom. Cheryl had her troubles, her marriage and children and divorce, and we dreamed for her, planned for her all the happy futures she could not find for herself – but she went her way. Dickie played golf, then took up bowls. We travelled a lot. My writing turned into a search for rhymes and my reading into Georgette Heyer, whom I love although she’s absurd. I’m absurd, too, in my way; but I like the direction I’m facing, not left or right, not up or down, just with my eyes wide open, hoping to see a few steps ahead, see a little part of the way I’ll go.

  I’ve said enough. This is where we are: a house, a garden, a troubled daughter, absent but happy (I hope) grandsons, our pastimes, our money in the bank. We also have our memories, though I don’t think Dickie goes there much.

  nine

  No matron slapped my bottom. My mother was the one in that ward. She dressed the woman down in her private-school voice, then had to turn her anger into getting Roly born. The girl with the stillborn baby was also there. I made her fat, poor soul, and invented her father. My own father explained to me why boots creak, but that was too much detail for my story.

  He worked in the same factory all his life and rose to foreman at the end. With the extra money he bought one of those vans with the body made of wood, and drove it badly, woodenly, along the western roads and out to the beaches, with Mum on a cushion beside him, limousining. In our own limousine we purred along behind. Watching Dad, enjoying him, slowed Dickie down.

  I said, ‘Why don’t we buy them a proper car?’

  ‘My old man would take one. Yours wouldn’t,’ Dickie said.

  He gave him bottles of whisky instead, and for the last few years of his life Dad drank only the best.

  That van (a Bradford, Dickie reminds me), lovingly maintained, kept puttering along for many years, and died with Dad. He drove to work that Friday morning. On the Whau Creek bridge outside New Lynn a horse float on its way home from the Avondale racecourse broke its coupling and ran into the oncoming traffic, where it cracked the Bradford open, tore its panelling like paper, and killed my father instantly.

  People kept reminding me that he didn’t suffer, but my real comfort came from Dad’s life: his honesty, his simplicity, and all those correlations between mind and hand bespeaking love. I felt him choke with it as he picked me up after a fall, sponged my bleeding knee, swabbed my elbow and wiped my tears away with his handkerchief (not always clean). How did he feel after whipping the boys? Mum told me he went into the garden and was sick. I’m sure that didn’t happen every time – but were there so many times? Mum reddened my bottom with the hearth brush frequently, but Roly tells me he can remember only two or three hidings – ‘which I asked for,’ he says. Lionel had more. He asked for them too. But poor Dad. Love marked the boundaries of his natural world. Duty came from the encroaching dark.

  He died. (The horse in the horse float died too.) My mother stayed with Dickie and me for a while – we were still in Kohimarama – but went back to Te Atatu Road when she and I began to bark and snarl at each other. Visiting her, I pulled in my extensions and became her daughter, while she (thin and weepy one moment, savage the next, when staying with me) put out feelers in every room, finding how to fill them and who she would be.

  That, it turned out, was a smiley widow with a sentimental view of the past, a persona that left her incomplete. It was some time before I discovered her two lost boys made up the rest. She saw them as not only lost to her – she could perhaps have borne that – but lost to themselves: Roly the postcard man, labouring in gardens here (up north) and there (down south), unmarried still and needing nothing and having nothing, and growing old with his life not lived; and Lionel in Christchurch, unmarried too, communicating by phone once a month and saying only that he was well. She did not believe it. Lionel worried her most.

  I drove out to see her with a gift, my newest poem:

  Little mother melancholy, I suspect your heart

  Of holding grievous converse in which I have no part …

  She read it and said, ‘It’s lovely, Rowan,’ and handed it back.

  ‘No, it’s for you.’

  ‘I’m not little,’ she said, patting her stomach, trying to joke.

  ‘You’re getting littler every day,’ I said. ‘Please tell me.’

  ‘I’m all right. I’m missing your dad.’

  ‘Yes, I know. But he doesn’t worry you, does he? It’s the boys.’

  ‘No. They came to the funeral. I thought they’d come more often, that’s all.’

  ‘They’ve got their lives, Mum.’

  ‘No they haven’t. They haven’t got lives.’

  At the funeral service she had freed her hand from Roly’s to brush tears from her cheeks, and Lionel had given her his handkerchief, folded square and white as ice. Now she cried properly, with her head laid on the table, and I put mine beside it in the crook of her arm and tried to comfort her, but in the end cried too.

  When we talked there were many words but little to say. I argued for Roly – he had chosen his life and it made him happy – but could not argue for Lionel. His choice, his way, when I thought of it, seemed clean and arid, a germ-free life. It was easy to fill in dentist things – basins and masks and rubber gloves and drills – and leave him in his surgery with a white nurse for company, and not wonder about what went on when he lo
cked the door at night and headed home; but Mum’s tears and mine put an end to that.

  ‘What’s wrong with him, Rowan? What’s wrong?’

  ‘I don’t know. He’s got some sort of knot tied inside him. I don’t know.’

  ‘Why won’t he get married? He used to have girls.’

  ‘He doesn’t like sharing his money,’ I joked.

  ‘He’s not mean. He sends me cheques. He sent Dad cheques. He has for years.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘None of your business, Rowan. What do you mean, knots? What sort of knots?’

  ‘I just mean he’s tied to a post.’ I can come out with metaphors on demand but they’re no diagnosis. Mum needed someone to explain Lionel in plain terms and tell her what she should do.

  I drove out to see her every second or third day, and was with her when she phoned him on the night of his birthday. Lionel was fifty, a number she felt must produce a change.

  ‘Lionel, it’s your mother. Happy birthday, Lionel.’

  There was no extension so I could not listen in, but his voice had an edge like glass and I heard him almost as clearly as Mum.

  ‘Hello, Mum. I thought you might ring.’

  ‘What are you doing, Lionel? Are you having a party?’

  ‘Me? No. I’m watching TV.’

  ‘Oh Lionel, on your birthday. When you’re fifty.’

  ‘Don’t remind me. Sixty next stop.’

  So they went on. He hadn’t had anything special for dinner but was drinking whisky and watching Antiques Roadshow.

  ‘You should have your friends there, Lionel. Did the people at work give you something?’

  ‘They didn’t know. Birthdays are –’ he deleted ‘crap’ ‘– no big deal.’